American Literature Commons^™

Outline: John Cotton, Gods Promise To His Plantations (1630/P. 1634), Jonathan Beecher Field

Jonathan Field

No abstract provided.

John Cotton: “Gods Promise To His Plantation” (1630), Jonathan Beecher Field

Jonathan Field

No abstract provided.

Pre-Service Teachers’ Perspectives On How The Use Of Toon Comic Books During Guided Reading Influenced Learning By Struggling Readers, Ewa Mcgrail, Alicja Rieger, Gina M. Doepker, Samantha Mcgeorge

Gina Doepker

The study presented in this article examines the use of comic books, specifically the TOON comic books during guided reading instruction. The instruction was provided to struggling readers by the Literacy Center at a comprehensive university in southeastern United States. What most pre-service teachers in this study agreed upon was that comic books served as an effective tool for getting their students interested in reading. Reading comic books with tutors as partners in conversation with the struggling readers in this study was also a powerful medium for facilitating students’ literacy skills development, particularly in the areas of reading fluency and …

New York 1987, Tyler Fisher

Tyler Fisher

Canal Boy To President 1881 Miller Ed.Pdf, Jon Miller

Jon Miller

No abstract provided.

Sophie Treadwell's Machinal: Electrifying The Female Body, Katherine Weiss

Katherine Weiss

Excerpt: The American playwright and journalist Sophie Treadwell dedicated her literary career to exploring the lives and motives of lonely and trapped individuals.

Book Review Of Emma Creedon, Sam Shepard And The Aesthetics Of Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Katherine Weiss

Katherine Weiss

Review of Emma Creedon, Sam Shepard and the Aesthetics of Performance Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, xi + 199 pp., $90.00.

Edgar Allan Poe: The Tell-Tale Hero, Michael David Bonifonte

Scott T. Allison

Emily Dickinson, Fascicle 26 / Packet 84 (Mobile Version), Jon Miller

Jon Miller

Emily Dickinson, Fascicle 26 / Packet 84, Jon Miller

Jon Miller

Adventures With Animals Big And Small, Emily Allen, Marcus Blandford, Shannon Brennan, Brennen Keen, Amanda Timm, Tara Penry, Sarah Obendorf

Tara Penry

The purpose of this project is to produce a short collection of out-of-print children’s stories that would be suitable for first grade level readers. Stories selected for the collection fit the theme of being seasonally themed and include animals as main protagonists. Under the guidance of Dr. Tara Penry, the class searched children’s magazines from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s to find stories that would be relevant and interesting to today’s elementary schoolers.

Progressive Foote? Gender Politics In An 1887 Letter From Mary Hallock Foote, Tara Penry

Tara Penry

Mary Hallock Foote is not known for progressive gender politics. Quite the opposite. As her biographer Darlis Miller observes, Foote and her longtime friend Helena DeKay Gilder agreed that woman’s most important work lay in the home, and suffrage would distract her from her primary duties. But Foote did not always practice her belief in the separate spheres of men and women perfectly. Not only did necessity compel her for a time to support her family, but an 1887 letter also shows that in her professional life, Foote did not always think of her work as feminine or separate from …

Ellen Glasgow: The “'Feminine' Façade” And The “'Masculine' Mind", Ashley Quaye Andrews Lear

Ashley Quaye Andrews Lear

No abstract provided.

A Letter And A Dream: The Literary Friendship Of Ellen Glasglow And Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Ashley Quaye Andrews Lear

Ashley Quaye Andrews Lear

No abstract provided.

An Anti-Locust Campaign In Nabokov (And Pushkin), Victor Fet

Victor Fet

Pushkin’s non-apocryphal anti-locust campaign is reflected in Nabokov’s unpublished sequel to The Gift.

Notes On Eryx, Omega, And Ata, Victor Fet

Victor Fet

Observations on several Nabokov’s works (Pale Fire, Lolita) where geographic or zoological names provide sources for puns and hidden parallels.

Four Indian-Related Novels By Lucia St. Clair Robson, Kenneth Estes Hall

Kenneth Estes Hall

Excerpt: Lucia St. Clair Robson began publishing historical novels in 1982 with Ride the Wind, which draws on the history of the Comanches, and has continued to work in the field of historical fiction. Four of her novels focus closely on historical personages: Ride the Wind (Cynthia Ann Parker and Quanah Parker); Light a Distant Fire (Osceola of the Seminoles); Walk in My Soul (Tiana Rogers of the Cherokee and Sam Houston); and Ghost Warrior(Lozen of the Chiricahua Apache).

A Note On Zane Grey's Lewis Wetzel, Kenneth Estes Hall

Kenneth Estes Hall

Excerpt: Zane Grey presented to readers of his early Frontier Trilogy1 a version of the frontiersman type in Lewis Wetzel, the famed Deathwind, scourge of Delawares and Shawnees in the Ohio Country.

What I’M Reading: Harper Lee’S 2 Novels, Jerome A. Gilbert

Jerome A. Gilbert, Ph.D.

Last fall, shortly after it was published, I read Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, and this summer I reread her classic To Kill a Mockingbird. The controversy around Watchman intrigued me. I saw the differences in the books mainly as the change between the perspectives of the young Scout and the adult Scout (aka Jean Louise). Unlike some, I saw the Watchman as an honest book reflecting the complicated reality of white America in the Jim Crow era.

Visionaries Of The American West : Mari Sandoz And Her Four Plains Protagonists, Lisa Rae Lindell

Lisa R. Lindell

The authorial reputation of Mari Sandoz has long rested in the shadow of other writers of her era. First of all, Sandoz wrote from and about a relatively remote region of the United States. In addition, she firmly refused to produce popular works at the expense of sacrificing the truth she perceived and wished to express. Consequently, Sandoz has often been classified as a regional writer and her works have been overlooked by many readers and critics. Her status as a woman, her unconventional writing style, point of view, and subject matter, and the blending of historical and fictional elements …

The Novel-To-Film Translatability Of Satire In The The Day Of The Locust And Wise Blood, Jason Mcentee

Jason McEntee

It comes as no surprise that the critical work focusing on Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1933) and Flannery O' Connor's Wise Blood (1952) sheds much light on the motifs satirical and otherwise at work in the novels. However, the film versions of the novels, those by legendary directors John Schlesinger (1969's Midnight Cowboy) and John Huston (1941's The Maltese Falcon), respectively, remain open to investigating how satire works within them. On the one hand, for instance, the popular vein of criticism regarding West and his Hollywood novel seems focused by the Frankfurt school of thought-mostly Adorno, and …

Trouble No More, Anthony Grooms

Tony Grooms

Second Edition of Anthony Groom's award-winning collection of short stories, Trouble No More, set throughout the American South, presents stories that engage with history, politics, class, race, childhood, and life. They are the personal and public troubles of the African American middle class. These stories are about families, intact and estranged, about ordinary lives in extraordinary times.

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …

Booker T. Washington And W.E.B. Du Bois: Guiding Students To Historical Context, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

Seldom have two vastly different visions been expressed as clearly and as elegantly as in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address (1895) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” (from The Souls of Black Folk, 1903). Awash in memorable rhetoric, these competing philosophies foresaw very different paths for America, and for black social progress, at the dawn of the twentieth century. This lesson introduces students to the ideas and informational texts of Washington and DuBois while challenging students to research some of the historical context in which these men lived, worked, and thought.

Booker T. Washington And W.E.B. Du Bois: Guiding Students To Historical Context, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

Seldom have two vastly different visions been expressed as clearly and as elegantly as in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Address (1895) and W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” (from The Souls of Black Folk, 1903). Awash in memorable rhetoric, these competing philosophies foresaw very different paths for America, and for black social progress, at the dawn of the twentieth century. This lesson introduces students to the ideas and informational texts of Washington and DuBois while challenging students to research some of the historical context in which these men lived, worked, and thought.

The Novel Of Sentiment In A Short Story: Reflections On Teaching “Theresa”, Adam Kotlarczyk

Adam Kotlarczyk

I introduced “Theresa” in between units on “The Age of Reason” and “American Romanticism.” Thus it was foregrounded by works like Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Phyllis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and followed by stories by Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe. Strictly speaking, this puts “Theresa” slightly out of sequence; its serialization in 1828 precedes by at least ten years the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Irving that we study. Despite this, the text functioned well as a transitional piece, although I would consider moving it deeper into the Romantic unit. The exotic setting, relative to our other …

You Have Rescued Me From Academicism, Alexander Olson

Alexander Olson

No abstract provided.

Lineages Of The Literary Left: Essays In Honor Of Alan M. Wald, Howard Brick, Robbie Lieberman, Paula Rabinowitz

Robbie Lieberman

For nearly half a century, Alan M. Wald’s pathbreaking research has demonstrated that attention to the complex lived experiences of writers on the Left provides a new context for viewing major achievements as well as instructive minor ones in United States fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism. His many publications have illuminated the creative lives of figures such as James T. Farrell, Willard Motley, Muriel Rukeyser, Philip Rahv, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Kenneth Fearing, and Arthur Miller. He has delved into a consideration of Sidney Hook and pragmatism, brought attention to debates within tendencies associated with Cannonism and Shachtmanism, and developed …

Conquering A Wilderness: Destruction And Development On The Great Plains In Mari Sandoz's Old Jules, Lisa Lindell

Lisa R. Lindell

Jules Ami Sandoz came to America in 1881 at the age of 22. Following a three-year sojourn in northeastern Nebraska, he headed further west, settling in the recently surveyed region northwest of the Nebraska Sandhills. In Old Jules, the biography of her pioneer father, Mari Sandoz presented a character filled with conflicts and contradictions. Pitted against Jules's dynamic vision of community growth was his self-centered and destructive nature. Well aware of the more unsavory qualities exhibited by her father. Sandoz nonetheless maintained that he and others like him were necessary to the development of the West. This recognition did not …